A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton

Writer Holly George-Warren talks about her new biography of the mercurial Big Star frontman Alex Chilton, including insights on his love/hate relationship with fame, his influence on 90s indie rock, and his obsession with astrology.

In 1968, teen phenoms the Box Tops were opening for the Beach Boys when they took a break from touring. The band's singer, Alex Chilton—barely old enough to vote at the time—was crashing at Dennis Wilson’s house in Pacific Palisades with a motley crew of musicians and hangers-on. Among them was Charles Manson, who was a struggling songwriter and not yet the decade’s iconic bogeyman. The morning after an unimaginably wild party, Chilton awoke groggy and confused to find Manson sprawled out on the couch next to him. It was, the young singer decided, time to go back to Tennessee.

Around 20 years later, in the early 1990s, Chilton asked music journalist Holly George-Warren to co-write a book recounting his experiences as a teen idol in the Box Tops, a frustrated power-pop auteur in Big Star, and a notoriously eccentric solo artist who gleefully deconstructed early rock, R&B, and even crooner anthems. His potential title: I Slept with Charlie Manson.

Sadly, I Slept with Charlie Manson never progressed beyond the planning stages. Chilton was soon distracted by Big Star and Box Tops reunions, and George-Warren was then launching her own career as a writer and editor. She has written and edited nearly 20 books on music and culture, including several editions of the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll and 2007’s Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry.

But now, four years after Chilton's death, George-Warren has written an exhaustive and deeply sympathetic biography that paints the picture of a profoundly complex, conflicted, and contradictory artist. She choose a slightly less sensational title, though.

Pitchfork: The first chapter of your book traces Chilton’s family tree all the way back to 1060 and establishes him a figure on scale with someone like Lincoln or Washington, even though he was a cult figure.

Holly George-Warren: I wanted this to be a traditional biography in that there would be some family background, and I do believe that people are derived from a certain gene pool. There’s both nature and nurture that makes them what they are, and maybe I have a little bit of belief in reincarnation, too. Alex’s family heritage was very interesting, especially when I discovered that his great-great-great-grandmother was a spiritualist. His family were actually plantation owners, but Alex was very vitriolic when it came to his criticism of racism in the South. He did a lot of research into his family history, and I think he had mixed feelings about it: He was very interested to learn about it, but he didn’t want to come across as a member of some Southern aristocracy. He lived a pretty hard working-class life, except in those little parts when he was a pop star.

Pitchfork: As celebrity biographies go, A Man Called Destruction doesn’t have the typical narrative arc where the person struggles to succeed and then becomes famous. Instead, Chilton had fame thrust on him when he didn’t seem to want it, and when he did want success, it was incredibly elusive.

HGW: He wanted it and he didn’t want it. He wanted to play music for a living, but being a cult figure didn’t pay the bills. The same thing happened with some of these seminal blues musicians, whose music influenced the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin while they were working as janitors and bus drivers. So I don’t think Alex is unique in that regard. He was doing the same kind of menial labor. But he never gave up on music. I’m happy that at the end of his life he was making money from Big Star and "That ‘70s Show"—he wasn’t a purist when it came to licensing his music. He saw it was a way to make money, and if he couldn’t be a pop star anymore, at least he could make money off the residuals.

"Alex Chilton was the Justin Bieber of his day."

Pitchfork: In the book’s epilogue, you reveal that you met Alex in 1982, when he produced some tracks for your band Clambake. How well did you know him then, and how did that inform this book?

HGW: I left that for the epilogue because I really wanted this to be a biography that is as objective as possible, though it’s probably impossible to make any kind of writing that you throw yourself into totally objective. Let’s put it this way: I didn’t want to be a character in the book. That experience may have opened the door to Alex’s world, but I was by no means a close enough associate of his to know his deep, dark secrets. Even when I did professional interviews with him for articles, I found it difficult to get a lot of information out of him. He put out that vibe that he loved to talk to you about what he loved to talk to you about, but it kept you from asking probing questions.

Pitchfork: It sounds like that firsthand experience was crucial to the book.

HGW: Definitely. I knew that he loved lamb chops; I had to fix him a lamb-chop dinner when he produced my little band. And I got to meet his bandmates and other people who were really into his music over the years, so that opened up a lot of doors. If I just came in straight from Music Journalism 101, without having been part of the scene and going to a zillion shows, I’m not sure if people would have shared stuff with me so readily.

I’m hoping that Alex comes across in the book as a complex person. There were so many different aspects of his personality. Over the years, he changed a lot, so when I met him he’d already gone through the crazy stuff. I never saw that part of him at all. He was always straight. Sometimes he was extremely friendly and gracious and outgoing. Other times he would snub me and be rude. You never knew which Alex you were going to get. But I’m very happy that my last interactions with him were extremely positive and convivial.

Pitchfork: As you mention in the book, he seemed to use subjects like literature and especially astrology as defense mechanisms to keep other people at a certain distance. Did that standoffishness make him a difficult subject?

HGW: I think he used astrology as a tool and a way to protect himself from the things he had gotten into in the past. Doing research for this book, I would be constantly amazed to really empathize with what Alex went through. He was the Justin Bieber of his day. He was in this boy band when he was only 16 years old, and we see this in stars who become hugely popular at such a young age: They can’t really process everything. So he used astrology as a survival mechanism. He made a lot of decisions based on astrological charts. So many writers told me that he completed dissed them when they tried to get an interview with him, even though they had perfectly good credentials. But his charts maybe told him that it wasn’t a good time to divulge secrets or talk with strangers. And then I would find these interviews that he did a few months later that were unbelievable. He completely opened up. If you looked at it on the surface, there was no rhyme or reason, but I think he was just following his charts.

Pitchfork: The late 1970s and early 1980s seem to be the worst period of his life. He was playing the rock star—picking up underage girls, doing a lot of drugs, trashing hotel rooms—even though he wasn’t a rock star anymore.

HGW: There was so much going on in Alex’s personal and professional life, and in the culture, so I could see why he would engage in that kind of self-destructive behavior. He had these big disappointments with the Big Star recordings, as well as this very intense relationship with Lesa Aldridge, which really wrung him out. And a lot of people were popping Quaaludes. That was huge in the 70s. It was part of the culture—that post-60s, pre-punk, nihilistic period. As he himself pointed out later when he looked back on that time, he had alcoholism in his family, so that was part of his ancestry right there. I quote him in the book talking about being sucked away from that whole youthful, high school dating period to be this pop star touring with the Box Tops. And he got married on his 18th birthday. So when that was all over, he wanted to go back and make up for lost time by acting like a crazy teenager again, even though he was in his late 20s at that point.

Pitchfork: There seems to be a tendency among Chilton’s fans to romanticize his commercial failures. Was that something you had to be aware of and work around while writing this book?

HGW: Alex pointed that out by saying something to the effect of: If Big Star had had a big hit the way the Raspberries did, then they wouldn’t have been so cool. They wouldn’t have been this failed band that made incredible music. There’s that whole mystique surrounding cult artists. Also, Big Star were from Memphis and were named after a regional grocery store chain, but according to Alex and [Big Star drummer] Jody Stephens, people in Memphis didn’t give a hoot about them. They were all into prog and Zeppelin and blues rock. It’s funny that Memphians consider Big Star their own secret treasure now.

Pitchfork: Despite being a cult artist, Chilton seems to exert outsize influence on subsequent generations of artists. Do you think the sense of irony that defined 90s indie rock might have had some roots in his music?

HGW: Definitely. When he started doing those [old country and crooner] covers, he was really into a lot of that stuff, but some of it he approached with a bit more irony. And there’s also the way he could be obtuse onstage and in interviews. From a business perspective, he was recording things on his own with a small budget, some of it pretty lo-fi, but that had an influence on bands like Pavement. That became really big for the whole indie scene: doing it your way, doing it on a smaller level, not kowtowing to major labels, but still making some money. After the Big Star records were reissued in 1992 and after they did the reunion show in 1993, Alex could have gotten a deal with a major label if he had gone back to that Big Star sound. But he refused to do that.

Pitchfork: At the end of the book, you emphasize that he was in a very good place personally and professionally.

HGW: That is the judgment I made based on interviewing people who were around him at the end of his life. Some of the people who were very close to him told me they saw him glowing with happiness. They thought he had found this love that he had really been looking for throughout his life. He was a mercurial guy, but I think you could say he found peace with the whole Big Star thing. He had reconciled painful memories of that band and those times when he thought he had been exploited and manipulated for someone else’s gain. I’m sure there were days when he was still bitter about it, but generally speaking, he had come to a place where he could accept his path and play those songs without feeling so much regret. He wasn’t struggling financially. He loved his little house. He loved New Orleans. I’m really glad he went out in a good place. I got emotional writing that part of the book. I wish he was still around and still happy. Who knows what would have happened with him? His voice was in great shape and he was writing songs in the last few years of his life. I wish we still had him here making music. I wish I was going to see him play this weekend.